Seems odd that when I attended the Dean meetups during the campaign, the largest group of people that I saw there weren't the stereotypical liberal college student (which, I admit, was closer to a description of myself). Rather, the people that I saw were from all groups of people, many of whom weren't your typical people you saw out doing campaign work. He got people from all walks of life involved.
I think what can most be learned from this year's primary campaign is the ability of the media and other candidates to "sell" a particular candidate as needed. Invariably, the one thing people remember about Dean was the "scream" that was blown way out of context, and was entirely appropriate for the noise level of the crowd. Yet, the media and the other candidates seized on the opportunity to use it for crass political gain, and it appears to have succeeded.
Like it or not, Dean actually revolutionized certain aspects of campaigning. Kerry makes millions through Internet campaigns, something that he wasn't doing before the success of the Dean system. The core group of Dean supporters still work with politics, and many people that I met during the campaign are now running for public office, something that many of them never saw themselves doing before this year. For someone with "all hype and no substance," it appears that he got something done.
Just a quick question: are you having alerts sent to your phone via an SMS gateway on your systems, or just sending email to a Nextel email address that forwards them to your SMS-enabled phone? I've been looking for the former for a system that I work on. If you could let me (and everyone else) know what software you use for that (if you do) I'd appreciate it:)
The point that is being advanced by the grandfather post is that 1% is insignificant insofar as that it quite possibly reflects mere statistical noise. Especially with something that depends on counters on certain web pages, an increase in articles of interest to Mozilla users on those web pages could be reflecting a 1% increase, which actually turns out to be false. It could also reflect rounding errors. Basically, 1% shifts in statistics such as this are at risk of being just normal shifts, without any real progress being made one way or the other.
Nah, he mentions at the end that it took him, among other things, one new motherboard to fix the problem. Why he bored us with the inane details of buying a new case and the thrilling, X-TREME! process of hunting down that elusive part, the heatsink, while not telling us about his search for a motherboard is beyond me. Quite frankly, the guy's not exactly all there, based on his reaction to many of the "problems" he faced.
It's not really so much a patent on GIFs per se, but a patent on the underlying compression algorithm used in the standard. Patents are designed to encourage development of new products and technologies by creating economic incentive through exclusivity periods. People who know that their product/technology will be able to make them money without undue competition for years down the road are more likely to develop things. That's the theory behind patents; whether it works in practice or not is not something I'm going to get into debating, especially on Slashdot.
The official date now is October 14th. They originally wanted to close it July 13th, but a lot of Half.com sellers complained about their plans for selling textbooks on the site before it shut down, so eBay switched the date to October 14th. On that date, Half.com will no longer exist and sales will be done using eBay's auction format or by eBay Stores for those sellers who can justify the cost.
Well, the grandparent is half right. Apple encodes from whatever the original recording was encoded at. However, the AAC files themselves are encoded in 44.1kHz regardless of what the original encoding was. So it all depends on the difference between standard Red Book encoding and Apple's encoding, to see which one sounds better during any downsampling that may occur in the process.
Invalid comparisons. Archive.org has terabytes of storage available to them, which was paid for by such donors as the Library of Congress, Alexa, and HP. They don't do it for free, they just shift the cost of the service to donors. Magnatune has quite a bit less selection of songs than iTunes, plus does nowhere near the bandwidth pull of iTunes. Allofmp3.com is on the very close fringes of illegality and isn't something I'm willing to touch. The fact of the matter is, trying to store 700,000 songs and transferring 100 million of those songs in just over a year (as they're preparing to do soon) at a cost of 99 cents is extremely prohibitive. Apple is barely making a profit on the iTMS as it is, and you want them to spend multiple times more on storage and bandwidth just so you can get a little bit more perceived quality? It's not worth it to them.
Don't get to used to buying your CDs on half.com anymore. After this next school year starts (so everyone can buy their textbooks on half.com), eBay is shutting down half.com so they can auction off books, CDs, etc. A thoroughly stupid idea IMO, but hey, what can I do?
Personally, though, I buy all my songs on iTMS today. As long as I personally can't tell a difference on my cheap speakers (far from high-end, but they sound good enough to listen to while working), that's what I'm going to listen to. My MP3 player purchase will probably be an iPod because I like the feature set and it integrates well with my iBook. iTMS just fits the bill for what I personally want in music.
If you're a web developer or work for a company that does anything related to web development (this covers well over half of all Slashdot users), you can get free licenses for Opera that take the standard ads off of the browser. I've included a link below to the donations page. Just fill it out and in a day or two they will send you a code that you can use to disable ads on your Opera installation(s).
On the off chance that you weren't being sarcastic (on the Internet, it's hard to tell), the original post was referring to Marvin the Paranoid Android from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which talked a computer to death by interfacing with it.
I'm sorry, but how can someone seriously say that they've never heard of "The Daily Show", especially if they're involved in a high-profile job? I mean, Jon Stewart's been on Newsweek's cover in the past year or two, and their 2000 election coverage was famous for months preceding the election. Even polls are now showing that "The Daily Show" is one of the top sources of news for young adults. For someone that high up the ladder to say that they didn't know about "The Daily Show" is highly questionable.
Betamax wasn't a Constitution-based decision, it rested on interpretation of copyright law. Since Congress controls copyright law, they can amend copyright law without any worry about the Constitution. In fact, the only thing the Constitution says about copyrights is that Congress has the ability to enact copyright laws.
That said, I'm not a big supporter of this law by any means. There comes a certain point where we've got to say enough is enough and start to campaign heavily against this sort of thing, and get it into the media.
-mm patches are patches to the kernel source by a guy named Andrew Morton. Basically, his patches are more of a "testing ground" for new features that, while useful to some, may be not up to the point of risking including them into a production kernel that is used by businesses who need stable kernels. The features are therefore put into Morton's patches so they can be tested by people who want to take the risk, and some of these patches may eventually migrate to the standard kernel after testing.
I have a bit of confusion over one patent they have listed, however. They label it as patenting "using a credit card online", whereas the patent that they link to is described as being a voice-based terminal for collecting loan applications and processing them based on user input and credit rating information. Can anyone tell me if I'm missing anything or if that's just a mistake on EFF's part?
While I haven't seen a plugin for MPC on iTunes, I do use a plugin that works with iTunes to play Vorbis files, which appears to be quite popular here on Slashdot (I don't really see the difference, but hey, that's beside the point). It only works on the Mac, however.
The episode with the brains ("The Day The Earth Stood Stupid") came before the one with Fry being his own grandfather ("Roswell That Ends Well"). Oddly enough, however, it was "Roswell That Ends Well" that won the only non-technical Emmy that the show ever received.
Actually, technically it hasn't retroactively altered the DRM. All songs bought before the release of iTunes 4.5 still use FairPlay v1, just look in the Info page for any song you bought previous to that point.
As for FairPlay v2, you had to agree to the new DRM terms when you used the Music Store for the first time after the release of iTunes 4.5. You had the option of not opting into FairPlay v2, you simply had to stop using iTMS. It's not anyone else's fault if you decided to go ahead and continue using the Music Store after the new DRM was released and you agreed to it.
Sometimes just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean you should. If the option was between iTMS and its pretty low-restriction DRM, or some other company with even greater restrictive DRM, I know which one I'd choose.
Face it, everyone, there's not going to be any record company that's ever going to say, "Oh, I guess the world wants freely-distributable music, let's give it to them." If that's what you're going for, then it's not worth it.
The problem with your idea is that, if you don't have a contract with Apple for the iTMS, you don't have a license to the music. It's just like any other EULA: you have the right to refuse the contract, but if there's no contract agreement, you have no legal license to use the software.
The fact that they're still competing with Microsoft means that Real isn't a monopoly. Real hasn't cornered any specific market as of yet. Monopolies apply to broad markets, not individual customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems odd that when I attended the Dean meetups during the campaign, the largest group of people that I saw there weren't the stereotypical liberal college student (which, I admit, was closer to a description of myself). Rather, the people that I saw were from all groups of people, many of whom weren't your typical people you saw out doing campaign work. He got people from all walks of life involved.
I think what can most be learned from this year's primary campaign is the ability of the media and other candidates to "sell" a particular candidate as needed. Invariably, the one thing people remember about Dean was the "scream" that was blown way out of context, and was entirely appropriate for the noise level of the crowd. Yet, the media and the other candidates seized on the opportunity to use it for crass political gain, and it appears to have succeeded.
Like it or not, Dean actually revolutionized certain aspects of campaigning. Kerry makes millions through Internet campaigns, something that he wasn't doing before the success of the Dean system. The core group of Dean supporters still work with politics, and many people that I met during the campaign are now running for public office, something that many of them never saw themselves doing before this year. For someone with "all hype and no substance," it appears that he got something done.
Actually, America runs Apache/2.0.48 (Solaris). Your America link goes to a parody site of the White House.
Just a quick question: are you having alerts sent to your phone via an SMS gateway on your systems, or just sending email to a Nextel email address that forwards them to your SMS-enabled phone? I've been looking for the former for a system that I work on. If you could let me (and everyone else) know what software you use for that (if you do) I'd appreciate it :)
The point that is being advanced by the grandfather post is that 1% is insignificant insofar as that it quite possibly reflects mere statistical noise. Especially with something that depends on counters on certain web pages, an increase in articles of interest to Mozilla users on those web pages could be reflecting a 1% increase, which actually turns out to be false. It could also reflect rounding errors. Basically, 1% shifts in statistics such as this are at risk of being just normal shifts, without any real progress being made one way or the other.
Nah, he mentions at the end that it took him, among other things, one new motherboard to fix the problem. Why he bored us with the inane details of buying a new case and the thrilling, X-TREME! process of hunting down that elusive part, the heatsink, while not telling us about his search for a motherboard is beyond me. Quite frankly, the guy's not exactly all there, based on his reaction to many of the "problems" he faced.
It's not really so much a patent on GIFs per se, but a patent on the underlying compression algorithm used in the standard. Patents are designed to encourage development of new products and technologies by creating economic incentive through exclusivity periods. People who know that their product/technology will be able to make them money without undue competition for years down the road are more likely to develop things. That's the theory behind patents; whether it works in practice or not is not something I'm going to get into debating, especially on Slashdot.
Here's a CNET article about the closing: http://news.com.com/2100-1017-991480.html.
The official date now is October 14th. They originally wanted to close it July 13th, but a lot of Half.com sellers complained about their plans for selling textbooks on the site before it shut down, so eBay switched the date to October 14th. On that date, Half.com will no longer exist and sales will be done using eBay's auction format or by eBay Stores for those sellers who can justify the cost.
Well, the grandparent is half right. Apple encodes from whatever the original recording was encoded at. However, the AAC files themselves are encoded in 44.1kHz regardless of what the original encoding was. So it all depends on the difference between standard Red Book encoding and Apple's encoding, to see which one sounds better during any downsampling that may occur in the process.
Invalid comparisons. Archive.org has terabytes of storage available to them, which was paid for by such donors as the Library of Congress, Alexa, and HP. They don't do it for free, they just shift the cost of the service to donors. Magnatune has quite a bit less selection of songs than iTunes, plus does nowhere near the bandwidth pull of iTunes. Allofmp3.com is on the very close fringes of illegality and isn't something I'm willing to touch. The fact of the matter is, trying to store 700,000 songs and transferring 100 million of those songs in just over a year (as they're preparing to do soon) at a cost of 99 cents is extremely prohibitive. Apple is barely making a profit on the iTMS as it is, and you want them to spend multiple times more on storage and bandwidth just so you can get a little bit more perceived quality? It's not worth it to them.
Don't get to used to buying your CDs on half.com anymore. After this next school year starts (so everyone can buy their textbooks on half.com), eBay is shutting down half.com so they can auction off books, CDs, etc. A thoroughly stupid idea IMO, but hey, what can I do?
Personally, though, I buy all my songs on iTMS today. As long as I personally can't tell a difference on my cheap speakers (far from high-end, but they sound good enough to listen to while working), that's what I'm going to listen to. My MP3 player purchase will probably be an iPod because I like the feature set and it integrates well with my iBook. iTMS just fits the bill for what I personally want in music.
Wrong.
A tip for you: use dictionary.com to confirm something you think is correct.
If you're a web developer or work for a company that does anything related to web development (this covers well over half of all Slashdot users), you can get free licenses for Opera that take the standard ads off of the browser. I've included a link below to the donations page. Just fill it out and in a day or two they will send you a code that you can use to disable ads on your Opera installation(s).
Opera Donations Program
On the off chance that you weren't being sarcastic (on the Internet, it's hard to tell), the original post was referring to Marvin the Paranoid Android from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", which talked a computer to death by interfacing with it.
I'm sorry, but how can someone seriously say that they've never heard of "The Daily Show", especially if they're involved in a high-profile job? I mean, Jon Stewart's been on Newsweek's cover in the past year or two, and their 2000 election coverage was famous for months preceding the election. Even polls are now showing that "The Daily Show" is one of the top sources of news for young adults. For someone that high up the ladder to say that they didn't know about "The Daily Show" is highly questionable.
Betamax wasn't a Constitution-based decision, it rested on interpretation of copyright law. Since Congress controls copyright law, they can amend copyright law without any worry about the Constitution. In fact, the only thing the Constitution says about copyrights is that Congress has the ability to enact copyright laws.
That said, I'm not a big supporter of this law by any means. There comes a certain point where we've got to say enough is enough and start to campaign heavily against this sort of thing, and get it into the media.
-mm patches are patches to the kernel source by a guy named Andrew Morton. Basically, his patches are more of a "testing ground" for new features that, while useful to some, may be not up to the point of risking including them into a production kernel that is used by businesses who need stable kernels. The features are therefore put into Morton's patches so they can be tested by people who want to take the risk, and some of these patches may eventually migrate to the standard kernel after testing.
Slight correction: the patent is labeled as "paying with a credit card online". No change in my original confusion, however.
I have a bit of confusion over one patent they have listed, however. They label it as patenting "using a credit card online", whereas the patent that they link to is described as being a voice-based terminal for collecting loan applications and processing them based on user input and credit rating information. Can anyone tell me if I'm missing anything or if that's just a mistake on EFF's part?
While I haven't seen a plugin for MPC on iTunes, I do use a plugin that works with iTunes to play Vorbis files, which appears to be quite popular here on Slashdot (I don't really see the difference, but hey, that's beside the point). It only works on the Mac, however.
Vorbis Quicktime/iTunes plugin
The episode with the brains ("The Day The Earth Stood Stupid") came before the one with Fry being his own grandfather ("Roswell That Ends Well"). Oddly enough, however, it was "Roswell That Ends Well" that won the only non-technical Emmy that the show ever received.
Actually, technically it hasn't retroactively altered the DRM. All songs bought before the release of iTunes 4.5 still use FairPlay v1, just look in the Info page for any song you bought previous to that point.
As for FairPlay v2, you had to agree to the new DRM terms when you used the Music Store for the first time after the release of iTunes 4.5. You had the option of not opting into FairPlay v2, you simply had to stop using iTMS. It's not anyone else's fault if you decided to go ahead and continue using the Music Store after the new DRM was released and you agreed to it.
Sometimes just because you have the right to do something doesn't mean you should. If the option was between iTMS and its pretty low-restriction DRM, or some other company with even greater restrictive DRM, I know which one I'd choose.
Face it, everyone, there's not going to be any record company that's ever going to say, "Oh, I guess the world wants freely-distributable music, let's give it to them." If that's what you're going for, then it's not worth it.
VideoLAN Client...a multiplatform audio/video player that's popular on both *nix and Mac OS X (in fact, I use it for some files myself).
The problem with your idea is that, if you don't have a contract with Apple for the iTMS, you don't have a license to the music. It's just like any other EULA: you have the right to refuse the contract, but if there's no contract agreement, you have no legal license to use the software.
The fact that they're still competing with Microsoft means that Real isn't a monopoly. Real hasn't cornered any specific market as of yet. Monopolies apply to broad markets, not individual customers.